Introduction

Video game music can contain many different music genres and sounds. They can be orchestral, jazz, electronic and more. In my research I want to explore this musical ‘genre’. When playing games and listening to the music I could hear differences in the types of music that were played in games. Based on that I tried to make two distinct group of video games, of which I could compare the music of. These groups that I chose are triple-A and Indie games. These two groups are often used to distinct types of video games in the video game community. Indie games are characterised by a small group of developers without the financial support of a publisher. Triple-A games can be seen as the opposite of that, in which that they are characterised by a game developed and published by a mid-sized or major publisher. To put it in the context of film, Triple-A are analogous to blockbuster movies and indie games can be seen as independent movies.

Because of this difference in financial budget, one can imagine that there would be a difference in what kind of music are produced and put in the game. Among other things, one can hear that usually in Triple-A games, the music consists of orchestral pieces and other high-budget components, like choirs. Indie games on the other hand usually make use of sounds that are easily created by a computer like chiptune and midi. Furthermore, in recent developments, Triple-A games have aimed to have a higher sense of immersion. They tried to achieve this by simulating real life as much as they could, having life-like scenery and humanistic character models. This pursuit of realism has also been translated in its music. In real life, there is no soundtrack to accompany your day to day activity. Just like in films, triple-a game developers have chosen for music that you do not really notice, but do add to the overall experience. Because of this, I also wanted to compare video game music to high-budget/blockbuster films.

Visualizations

In this graph I plotted valence against energy. You can see clear patterns emerging from the different genres. Noticeably when looking at the indie genre, a wide variety of music can be seen with both high and low energy and high and low valence, with a small saturation in the low energy and low valence corner in the bottom left.

This saturation is more prevalent in de triple-a and film genre. These genres do not have that much variety in their energy and valence levels. Especially in the triple-a genre one can notice that the top half of the graph is rather unpopulated when compared to the bottom half.

Chromagrams

The chromagram is from the song Roger and Me from the Diablo II soundtrack

Cepstrograms

The cepstrogram is from the song Roger and Me from the Diablo II soundtrack

Keygrams

The keygram is from the song Roger and Me from the Diablo II soundtrack

clustering